Performative efficiency and ‘The Overwhelm’
Opinion
UK advertisers spend billions on channels and metrics that provide the illusion of control but often fail to deliver. The real opportunity lies in re-evaluating default media behaviours, but is ‘The Overwhelm’ getting in the way? In the first of a three-part series, Dan Gee examines the role of performative efficiency in this complex dance of disinformation.
The Overwhelm. We all know it. The twitching urgency of Slack notifications, Teams alerts, dashboards, doomscrolls, deadlines and demands that mean we never quite switch off.
For marketers, the challenge is doubled. We live in the same fog as everyone else, but we also have to cut through it. To persuade people who are already overloaded to pay attention to our messages.
If we’re honest, marketers contribute to this as well. We’re the architects of our own cacophonous treadmill. Our perennial search for the shiny new marketing panacea—be it a channel, tactic, or metric—adds a new layer of noise. The result is not impact but clutter.
So, where have we gone wrong? Why has one of the most powerful growth levers for a business gradually found it harder and harder to get taken seriously? Why are we shouting ever louder, but somehow contributing less?
Performative efficiency
Central to this trend is the concept of performative efficiency. Marketers and their agencies focus on appearing to do more with less, rather than on real growth. And vendors that are most skilled at claiming credit for delivering results are taking the majority of the revenue.
Within this distracting dance of disinformation, eye-watering sums get wasted. Beyond clicks and conversions being attributed to the last touch (yes, it still happens way more than it should), and over and above the self-assessed homework of the platforms, the money wasted due to the prime directive of efficiency is substantial.
Take ad fraud. Somewhere between US$80–100bn vanishes into fake clicks and impressions each year. Based on numbers from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, that’s more than twice the global heroin trade. It’s money that could launch products or build brands. Instead, it props up criminal networks. Yet this is shrugged off as the cost of doing business.
Opportunity knocks
However, for the savvy marketer, when others are wasting their money on fake engagement, false metrics, and organised crime, opportunity knocks. Those willing to reconsider their default buys and consider more fully how and where to engage with their audiences will have a competitive edge.
Take social media, for example. It’s no longer truly social. Meta’s own data shows that only 7% of the content on Instagram now comes from friends. On Facebook, it’s 17%.
Social media is no longer genuinely social; it’s a crafted distraction. A transactional space where dopamine is traded for attention. The reach remains substantial, but the trust, credibility, and positivity that once were inherent are rapidly diminishing.
So what should we do? The first step is to revisit the brief, the real brief, the one with actual business objectives. Embrace accountability and bring media and creative teams closer together so there’s nowhere to hide.
The reward for asking these questions is not just efficiency in the real sense of the word, but greater impact from paid media.
Resist efficiency theatre
If competitors are losing budget to fraud, if they are locked into paid search behaviours or retail media commitments that act more as a tax than a tactic, if they are optimising for performative efficiency and vanity metrics, then simply avoiding those traps creates an advantage. Their waste is your opportunity.
The overwhelm isn’t going away. But it is possible to navigate it with more clarity.
Marketers who resist efficiency theatre, who embrace real accountability, who rethink defaults and deploy media with more imagination, will not just feel saner. They will grow faster.
Dan Gee is managing director of Media Futures Market